Reader Response #2

“Me and Miss Mandible” & “Emergency”

Q:        What specific passages in the work trigger that reaction?

A:        In “Me and Miss Mandible,” the very first day he begins writing, September 13, gave me a reaction like no other days he wrote.  I think this day stuck out to me the most because we’re just getting into the story and, BAM! it’s very forward.  He is talking about how he is a young, young student, and his teacher, Miss Mandible, is very attractive to him, and he knows she feels the same way.  He just wonders when she will make her move.

After reading the first passage, I was kind of taken aback.  I was confused.  He talks about being an eleven year old boy, but in all actuality he is a thirty-five year old man.  Knowing this information right off the back helps me to understand the rest of the story, then understanding his crush on Miss Mandible.

If that wasn’t enough, he also says he has the hots for a girl in his class; girl who is his age, eleven, but who is also a woman inside herself.  “…with a woman’s disguised aggression and a woman’s peculiar contradictions.” (17)  This passage led me to confusion because I wasn’t sure how ole or young he really was.  Throughout the story, I was just as confused.  Although that information from the first passage helped me move along the story with knowing facts about him, I was still baffled at the end.

“Emergency”

In the short story “Emergency,” there was one important part in the story that helped to make the whole story important.  The paragraph says, “After awhile you forget it’s summer.  You don’t remember what the morning is.  I’d worked two doubles with eight hours off in between, which I’d spent sleeping on a gurney in the nurse’s station.  Georgie’s pills were making me feel like a giant helium-filled balloon, but I was wide awake.  Georgie and I went out to the lot, to his orange pickup.”  The reason why I feel like this is an important piece in the story is because I feel like it explains a lot.  From this one paragraph, we learn a lot about the narrator.  Not only do we find out about his work schedule and why he’s always so tired, but we also know how the pills that he and Georgie take make him feel.  I feel like when we figure out how those pills make the narrator feel, it helps explain the rest of the story.  As an audience, we’ve already seen him taking them and how Georgie gets them.  The effects of the pills take place throughout the rest of the story, and because we know how they make the narrator feel by this important paragraph, it can explain the crazy things him and Georgie do together.